We are a sinful church. We are naked. Our anger, our pain, our
anguish, our shame and our vulnerability are clear to the whole world.
Im prepared to take the responsibility, and thats something I have
to live with.

Those were the words of then-Archbishop Alphonsus Penney of
Newfoundland, Canada, in 1990 on announcing his resignation after a committee
that he had appointed to look into sexual abuse in his archdiocese returned a
scathing assessment of his handling of the matter.

Penney did not have Vatican approval to resign. He just did so because
he had come to realize that he had terribly mishandled reports of sexual abuse
of children. He had failed his people as a spiritual leader. And he stepped
down.

The Penney incident, in the wake of the weeks reports here on sex
abuse, is instructive in a host of ways. First, it was a bishop taking
responsibility, without any qualifiers or excuses, for what happened on his
watch. Nowhere did he blame the press or an oversexed culture or the reforms of
Vatican II or his lack of understanding of the problem or a lack of
communication with his fellow prelates or the lack of understanding of sexual
abuse by the social sciences of that era. People had been hurt; he had been a
large reason the hurt continued. He apologized and he stepped aside.

After he resigned, he sat for a detailed interview (NCR, Aug. 10,
1990) and recounted the insights he had gained during the ordeal, not least of
which was the support of people appreciative of the way he sacrificed his
career for the integrity of the church.

~ ~ ~

We dedicate a significant portion of this weeks newspaper to the
reports of the National Review Board, including an analysis by Joe Feuerherd,
who attended the news conference and interviewed a wide range of Catholic
leaders and thinkers; an in-depth look by author Jason Berry at the processes
of the review board through the experience of member Pamela Hayes, a Manhattan
attorney; and a commentary by Dominican Fr. Thomas Doyle, who, in the
mid-1980s, realized the growing dimensions of the priest sex-abuse crisis and
refused to go along with the cover-up.

This is a historic moment for the church, and I never use that
description lightly. For it is finally the beginning of an accounting, after 20
years, of basic information that the church had a right to know all along.

Now what?

It is necessary to keep in mind, as a way of understanding what we face
in the future, that the bishops have been forced by public pressure to disclose
what information we now have. Every step of the way they resisted, though they
were asked repeatedly for the information by this publication and others. It is
distressing to realize that most bishops responded not to the cries of victims,
their families and ordinary Catholics who were angered by the scandal. They
finally responded only when the ugliness and extent of the abuse and cover-up
reached the wider culture.

~ ~ ~

Now what? Who knows?

The report itself and interviews with review board members make clear
what was known all along: No mechanism exists for holding our bishops
accountable.

What is missing after all the years of anguish and headlines and spoken
resolve and apologies is what cant be forced -- true remorse and the
actions that make it credible.

We all know failure and sin. Husbands and wives, sons and daughters,
friends, all of us know what it means to betray trust and how painful it is to
restore. Without true remorse and action to back it up, the scandal will never
become history, as Bishop Wilton Gregory claims.